Dennis Haarsager's rolling environmental scan for electronic media. "Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us." --Jerry Garcia "Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then." --Bob Seger

Twitter @haarsager

Monday, 29 November 2004

Six and a half years ago, [XM CEO Hugh Panero] believed in subscription radio service when few others did. Secure in that belief, Panero turned a staff of fewer than a dozen working out of a windowless basement office in downtown Washington into the leading satellite radio service, with more than 500 employees and 2.5 million subscribers. Its only direct competitor, Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. of New York, has 800,000 subscribers. ¶ Satellite radio has now come into its own, and competition is sizzling. ... Link: washingtonpost.com.

While hanging a television on the living- room wall may have captured the imagination of American consumers, it has yet to empty many pocketbooks. ¶ That may soon change as a glut of liquid crystal display flat-panel televisions, called L.C.D.'s, enter the market, a result of a boom in new factories. According to several manufacturers and analysts, the prices for L.C.D. flat-panel TV's will drop in the new year, falling by as much as 30 percent by the end of 2005. The prices of plasma flat-panel TV's are also expected to fall significantly. ... Link: The New York Times.

Not just music, but other audio, video, games, mobile content like ringtones, etc. Thanks to paidcontent.org for the tip. --Dennis ... GoFish works like a comparison shopping site. It fetches feeds from merchants' media catalogues, indexes them and makes them searchable. The company is getting feeds from iTunes, Napster, Musicmatch, eMusic, Streamwaves and a host of other online merchants, allowing users to search across all the services from one place. ... Link: SiliconBeat.

... From the perspective of publishers, the 18- to 34-year-old demographic is highly prized by advertisers -- the people who make writing, editing and working at a newspaper or magazine a vocation, not just an avocation... But there is trouble afoot. The seeds have been planted for a tremendous upheaval in the material world of publishing. ¶ Young people just aren't interested in reading newspapers and print magazines. In fact, according to Washington City Paper, The Washington Post organized a series of six focus groups in September to determine why the paper was having so much trouble attracting younger readers. You see, daily circulation, which had been holding firm at 770,000 subscribers for the last few years, fell more than 6 percent to about 720,100 by June 2004, with the paper losing 4,000 paying subscribers every month. ...¶... The Post experience merely mirrors the results of a September study (.pdf) by the Online Publishers Association, which found that 18- to 34-year-olds are far more apt to log on to the internet (46 percent) than watch TV (35 percent), read a book (7 percent), turn on a radio (3 percent), read a newspaper (also 3 percent) or flip through a magazine (less than 1 percent). ... Link: Wired News.

Doug Kaye of IT Conversations provides a good overview of how to monetize online content -- podcasting in his case -- in his wiki: The one question I'm asked about IT Conversations more than any other is, "What's your business model?" After 18 months, nearly 300 programs and now with the New Year looming, the time has come to answer that question. ¶ I'd like your help in deciding how to make IT Conversations self-sustaining. As is true for other podcasters (if you can call IT Conversations a podcast) this is virgin territory. No one really knows what will work and what won't. But if any business model is to be successful it's got to meet the needs of the listeners without whom there would be no business to model. ... Link: IT Conversations Wiki.

Friday, 26 November 2004

The digital television revolution is set to be led by Freeview rather than Sky, according to a report by the UK’s biggest media agency buying group. ¶ OMD’s media negotiating company, Opera, claims in its forecasts for 2005 that Freeview will be in more homes than Rupert Murdoch’s satellite giant by the end of next year and will come to dominate the DTV market in years to come. ...¶... With free-to-air digital box sets available in the shops for as little as £30, Opera predicts a major shift in the order of supremacy, forecasting that Freeview will be in 10 million homes by the end of 2006 – five years ahead of Sky. ... Link: Media Week.

It's going to be a long time before digital music downloads challenge CD sales, even in the online world. That's the conclusion of a report by market watcher Informa Media Group (IMG), published this week. ¶ Come 2010, IMG says, global online music sales will exceed $6bn. An impressive number, but still only 15.2 per cent of total spending on music worldwide. ¶ But still a healthy sum to share among the likes of Apple's iTunes, Napster, Virgin Digital, Wal-Mart, Tesco and co., surely? Well, not quite. That figure represents not only sales of digital downloads and subscription revenue, but CDs purchased from Amazon and co. ¶ Digital downloads will account for half of the total - $3.1bn. ¶ That amounts to 7.7 per cent of total music sales, leaving CD, DVD and their successor physical formats taking 92.3 per cent of the market. ... Link: The Register.

The dawn of digital music distribution has seen the UK music industry enjoy its best 12 months for album sales in history, with 237 million units sold. ¶ While interest in music reawakens, digital downloads drove single track sales up 9.4 per cent in the third quarter, with 1.75 million sales through multiple online distributors, compared with 7.3 million physical single sales. ... Link: Macworld UK.